Where do you get a 200K+ job in Nowhere, MO? What does a 20-something do to earn that much? I don’t get that part.
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Remote tech work pays a lot. I know many folks who could live in a swamp as long as they had decent internet. Definitely 6 figures territory, too.
The hard part is getting the right skills (some there is no way other than just doing it for a company) and also demonstrating a salary history so you have bargaining power.
So yeah, there is a bit of chicken and egg. “Social capital” mentioned earlier does hit the nail on the head–doable if you have someone to guide you.
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I guess there are low six-figure jobs for people in their 20s in the middle of nowhere in the energy and resource-extraction industries, but they’re usually dangerous, back-breaking, and are available only in boom-and-bust cycles (which means when you are working your cost of living is going to be sky-high).
Yes, and that hard part takes time. Most people don’t reach that level until their early 40s. You need to have at least a bachelor’s degree, put in at least 15 years in corporate jobs, and build a lot of relationships (part of the social capital) before anyone will trust you to work remotely while paying that kind of hourly (which at that point implies a consulting gig).
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+MANY.
The building codes exist for a good reason. Most insurance companies won’t touch a house that was not built to the relevant code at the time it was built, and then there’s the issue of selling the house…
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I do not want to give away too much of my personal situation, but as an increasingly remote working techie, I can easily see a 20-something with a good mentor being able to do my current job instead of myself as a 30-something with 13 years industry experience.
When I mentioned six figures, I meant salary. But it probably is easier to hit that with contract work.
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It’s easy to bust on these folks, but there is something to what they’re saying. For a lot of people, their expenses always stay one step ahead of their income. They can make 250K a year and still be broke all the time. It’s true that having a job that pays you a lot can make a huge difference, but it’s surprising how many people it doesn’t make much of a difference for - they just get broke more expensively. There are a lot of high-income folks perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy.
I grew up pretty modest, and went through about a decade of scraping (donating blood plasma for food money, etc.), to the point where a graduate stipend seemed like I’d hit the big time. My first job after grad school paid me three times more than I’d ever made in a year before. I could see then that if I kept spending like I was poor while earning an increasing salary I could bank a lot of it and it would make a big difference later on. I remember talking to my new co-workers and being just gobsmacked they didn’t even put enough in their 401Ks to get the full company match.
I probably would have found these folks very compelling if I ran into them at the right time. I somewhat admire them now, and I think they’re probably helping a lot of people. It’s true that not everybody could really retire in their thirties, but the number of people who are behind the eight ball and don’t really need to be is also very high.
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This should be ridiculously obvious, except for the obtuse moneyed people who buy into this shtick. The reality is so patently absurd as an option for the vast majority of people that I anticipate James Altucher will jump on it as his next, very public, lifestyle incarnation.
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I’ve recommended some of these FIRE/frugality sites to friends and acquaintances in serious debt. I just tell them to ignore the early retirement stuff and focus on the budgeting and cost-reduction tips. It’s basic, common-sense advice but many people need it presented in a compelling and aspirational format.
That’s where the real value in this movement lies for those who don’t have the financial or social capital to retire early.
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Sorry, but isn’t your parents’ fate a perfect example of how FIRE might have made a difference in their lives? If they’d saved like mad and retired at, let’s say, 35, wouldn’t they have had 20 fulfilling years doing whatever made them happy?
The comment sections in FIRE articles are so aggravating. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t do it! But people have, and will continue to, succeed at early retirement. As Mr. Money Mustache said in the video, everyone, even poor people, can better their situation by saving more. Why is that such a terrible message for some people?
All I can say is: don’t fool yourself thinking that the things you buy with money are the things that make you happy (and that giving them up will deprive you of happiness). Once you’ve got the basics covered, everything else is a want, not a need. If you don’t have the basics covered, you have bigger problems to solve than a video on the internet.
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I guess it depends on how early is early retirement.
Another commenter mentioned that people who can afford to save to retire early likely have decent jobs and don’t have to worry about making the rent, or putting shoes on their kids feet, as my parents did. For some people, there’s no such thing as saving; you spend everything you earn on surviving.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
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That’s an interesting take on it; the learning budgeting aspect, etc.
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Oh yes, I live in a house that suffered the tender mercies of a DIYer. Among other things, the 8ft by 18 ft addition on the back of the house had no wall studs. As near as my contractor can figure, the roof was held up by the patio door frame.
I much prefer to pay the nice man the nice money to have a proper job done.
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I retired at 35 from a miserable software engineering job. It wasn’t nearly as great as I expected; I’m an introvert, prone to depression, and frankly lazy so for more than a decade I spent way more time watching TV, reading boingboing and generally farting around than I predicted. One of the biggest disappointments was not being able to do as much making as I wanted because DIY is generally expensive compared to just buying something made in China off amazon.
For the last year I have been working part time bagging groceries, and finding it much more satisfying than cubicle jobs; interacting with people thanking me all the time, and getting paid for physical exercise has been great. Not having to live on the minimum wage of that my coworkers do is the special sauce.
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Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
— Hilaire Belloc.
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Apparently it’s quite easy to write a snarky reply or roll your eyes at FIRE, but FIRE’s always seemed like a healthier approach than the flip side of spending as much as you earn and not thinking how you might want to live your life if you didn’t have to trade your time for money just to live. Now, granted not everyone has that option if they’re making less than a living wage, but just about anyone online reading about FIRE (and certainly the fine folks here) have disposable income and a choice in how they want to spend it.
It also seems pretty lazy to tar everyone aspiring to not be a wage slave until they keel over as simply over-privileged bourgeoisie - I surf through r/financialindependence and r/leanfire every once in a while and see lots of people that aren’t. My personal background was growing up lower-middle class/sometimes below the poverty line, having student loans (even w/ academic scholarships and 20h+/wk of work throughout college), and certainly no financial help (in terms of habits or obviously monetarily) from my parents. To me, saying it’s “just for rich people” dismissively, is like… I mean, what’s even the goal there? Is it better to have a negative savings rate like everyone else? Should people trying to FIRE be castigated for not encouraging everyone to max out their credit cards and buy more stuff they don’t need instead of trying to be thrifty and independent? Should people not think about how they can stop doing unfulfilling things with their lives just to keep on the treadmill? Or to try to push some sort of idea that it’s an impossible goal so people shouldn’t even try or partake in the kind of long-term financial planning/thinking that aspiring to FIRE requires because that should only be for rich people? I’m really trying to understand the logic here.
I stumbled on FIRE/FIRECalc through probably the old Bogleheads around 2001 or 2002 and it seemed like a good idea. Along with old-school books like The Millionaire Next Door, or Your Money or Your Life, it got me to think about the time value of money, the dual effects of compound returns, and all the ways you could be living your life. FIRE isn’t rocket science btw, and I recommend everything to crunch their numbers. Every $25 invested is $1 that you can spend every year for the rest of your life. This is irrespective of how much you earn, and if you look at it that way, you have 25X more leverage lowering your cost of living than trying to earn more). Plug your numbers into FIREcalc (still around after 15+yrs!) and run the monte carlo simulations. Play around w/ your expenses from your budget (everyone has one of those right, or is that only a thing trust-fund FIRE people do and shame on them for encouraging people to have a handle on that sort of thing) and see how they move based on what you cut out.
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You guys sound like nay sayers!!??!! Why not say how can I do this? Vs why can’t it be done?
It took till the later part of my day job career until I realized there are not limits to my success. So we started working our butts off and now own enough rentals to be able to say “I quit”. FIRE is possible, for me it happened later in life but at list it DID happen.
FIRE is not black and white, there’s shades of gray from having extra cash, to more then enough to quit.
We also don;t stop earning. We change from earning from an un-fulfilling job to something we like more. For me its buying and managing our own rentals.
Frugality is a great message, but when it comes from someone of inherited wealth it may fall on deaf ears.
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What you’re seeing is not snark or naysaying but an attempt to temper the sometimes breathless claims of FIRE with the realities of late-stage capitalist America.
No-one here is denying the benefits of thrift and frugality or of opting out of consumerism. The site and community regularly promotes Maker and DIY culture, for example, and various American debt-trap industries are raked over the coals regularly. People here have the luxury of taking these position and/or see that there’s no other healthy choice but to do so.
No-one is denying micro-economic realities, either. We’re all familiar with the Micawber Principle of finance under one name or another, understand the power of compound interest for good (investing) and bad (debt), know the importance of keeping a budget, and know that an automobile is the opposite of an investment. These concepts may not be intuitive to a lot of people and definitely aren’t required topics in American K-12 curricula but, as you say, none of them is rocket science.
What is happening here is that people are making the distinction between living within one’s means or escaping debt on the one hand and being able to retire early or achieve financial independence on the other. It is a distinction that’s especially important in a society where inequality is growing at the same time that everyone is being told “there’s no such thing as society, so you’re on your own.” This is a society where the precariat is quickly giving way to the unnecessariat and the idea of a significant amount of disposable income is a pipe dream.
In that society, no, not everyone can achieve FIRE. It is, at best, an aspiration of the college-credentialed middle class (or particularly successful skilled tradespeople). Meanwhile, for a large group of Americans, the lack of a living wage or a secure job means that living within one’s means turns out to involve malnutrition and ever-increasing debt. Even those with steady lower-middle-class wage often find themselves unable to amass the savings to cover a $400 emergency. To claim that these people will be able to retire before age 65, let alone age 35, is to hold out an unrealistic goal. To castigate them for trying to enjoy a little pleasure now and then or, worse, to criticise them for buying a modern necessity like a mobile phone is mean-spirited.
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